Is water cooling necessary?

[Salem Graves]

I want to get a new pc at some point and am wondering if I really need water cooling.. I don't really care how loud my pc gets and I likely won't push it to the ultimate maximum anyway. I've read that water coolers can be dangerous if mishandled, high maintenance and hard to ship so I'm not sure if I want to deal with all that. So is water cooling really necessary?

[Spec_Ops_Ape]

Water cooling is absolutely NOT required, decent air coolers can be just as good as a decent aio.

[nullable]

Nguyên văn bởi Suicidaire:

Is water cooling necessary?

No. It's just an option available. What would make you think it might be?

[invision2212]

air cooling is fine as long as your not trying to break world records overclocking

[Zireth]

Air coolers can do either the same or even better than a AIO liquid cooler depending on the cooler.

I know the Be Quiet dark rock pro 4 and noctua NH-D15 are top dogs in Air cooling.

I'd take a custom water loop to beat the temps of those two since custom loops can benefit off of more radiators and fans than typical AIO liquid coolers.

[_I_]

wc can be as loud as air
the rads need to take heat out of the system

stock coolers are good enough for stock speeds
212 +/evo/black etc.. are good for a mild oc on most cpus
nh-d12 can beat match most 120mm clc kits

[Ariortega]

I can totally agree to everyone that have replied until now, they're totally right.

And you know what? It's just my personal perception that the majority of pc gamers only go for watercooling (AiO or custom) because of the looks (RGB etc.). Only a tiny few gamers / users go specificly for watercooling because of heavy overclocking and / or reduction of noise level, especially in terms of the gpu.

But, as mentioned already: if you're not going for worldrecord overclocking or a near dead silent pc there's is no need for water cooling. Stick to a decent air cooler, e.g. Be Quiet! or Noctua and you're totally fine.

[Arya]

Air and Water are just cooling options. The "best" is the one that suits your building goals the best; they both have pros and cons and suit different types of PC.

For raw cooling performance, both are more-than-enough for any existing gaming PC. Theoretically a Water Cooler can achieve lower temps, but in reality that will be a small difference and will have no effect on performance unless you're running a very significant overclock.

And for silence, Air Cooling is actually preferable. Remember, a Water Cooler needs a pump to circulate it's coolant, and those pumps are pretty loud. Even the fancy aftermarket ones. If you want a silent PC, look into Passive Air Cooling - Passive Heatsinks don't have any moving parts and are 100% silent. Often at the cost of being absolutely enormous and needing a huge case.

And speaking of size; I would argue the best thing about Water Cooling is how little space it takes up. Say you're making an HTPC and you want a Form Factor similar to a VCR player to fit in your TV cabinet. A big Twin-Tower Air Cooler won't fit, but a 360mm Water Cooler will. And will probably give you about the same cooling performance.

Taking a step back; CPU Cooler performance, like RAM Capacity, makes little actual performance difference once you have enough. If the PC doesn't overheat under any circumstance, that's good enough. And any extra cooling is just more noise, bulk and expense.

The one place where Water Cooling *can* make a difference is your Graphics Card. An aftermarket Water Cooling system can allow for more aggressive GPU overclocks, and that DOES push your framerate up. But that's a very expensive upgrade path, and you're better off just buying a more powerful GPU in the first place. We're talking about such an expensive upgrade that you could almost buy a second GPU for the price.

[Arya]

My own setup is an Intel i7 8700K, and I recently upgraded to a BeQuiet Dark Rock Pro 4. Which is a Twin-Tower Air Cooler. I run the i7 moderately overclocked - 4.9 GHz on all cores - so cooling matters.

And yet even with "only" the two stock fans, and a very mild Fan Curve, I've found the DRP4 is more than good enough. My PC is running cold and quiet; gaming temps are between 48 and 60 c with virtually no perceptible cooler noise even with the case open.

Part of that is also having a very well-ventilated case. I'm using a Fractal Design Define-S2 Meshify. With the full compliment of fans; 3 front, 2 bottom, 4 top, 1 rear. Case Airflow has a huge impact on your cooling performance; if your case is pooling hot air, it becomes an oven.

[iceman1980]

Nguyên văn bởi Suicidaire:

I want to get a new pc at some point and am wondering if I really need water cooling.. I don't really care how loud my pc gets and I likely won't push it to the ultimate maximum anyway. I've read that water coolers can be dangerous if mishandled, high maintenance and hard to ship so I'm not sure if I want to deal with all that. So is water cooling really necessary?

Only if you are running a CS-1 Waferscale monster. Aka that "AI Processing chip" that runs on refrigerated water. (400,000 processor cores)

[Monk]

I have a feeling OP is talking about custom open loops when they refers to maintainance.

There are 3 real ways to cool your pc.

An air cooler, cheapest, but can be bulky, can cool as well as an aio at half the price, downside is they are bulky and ugly.

An AiO or all in one closed loop water cooling, it's plug abd play, no testing, no maintainance, unless you are an idiot and swing it round by the block, it's very unlikelyly to leak, far more reliable than some would have you believe, but, there is the pump as a possible point if failure unlike air coolers, they look better than air coolers, but, unless you are payi g double the price of an air cooler, it likely won't cool any better and then, it's a small margin.

Finally there is custom or open loop watercooling.
These are the kits you build yourself, as long as you don't go with a single tiny radiator they will offer the best cooling by some margin, at a cost, like, atleast 2-3x the cost if a good aio or 4x the cost of an air cooler, minimum and can cost as much or more than an entire gaming pc (I have 2 loops, one cost around £1400 the other will likely be closer to 1700 when finished).
They require maintainance yearly atleast to swap out the fluid and need to be fully leak tested to ensure safe operation (if it passes this they are very unlikely to develop a leak if it doesn't happen initially).

The Cons, are obvious, cost and work involved however the work can be a plus as its fun to do, atleast for me and most users I know, the pros are the best cooling potential by a very large margin and it looks awesome, only really worth doing with top end builds where the money couldn't be spent elsewhere to gain performance and, the only really if you want to push your kit to its limit to get the best performance possible out of it, it really is the enthusiast option.

It's also what i class as watercooling, so do alot of enthusiasts, an aio isn't really as its plug and play.

[CravenCoyote]

Nguyên văn bởi Wolfey:

Big post :)

There are some inaccuracies with this. I'm not calling you out on this stuff personally, but some of the post isn't accurate.

And for silence, Air Cooling is actually preferable. Remember, a Water Cooler needs a pump to circulate it's coolant, and those pumps are pretty loud. Even the fancy aftermarket ones. If you want a silent PC, look into Passive Air Cooling - Passive Heatsinks don't have any moving parts and are 100% silent. Often at the cost of being absolutely enormous and needing a huge case.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but a pump in a custom loop runs very quietly - to the point it's almost inaudible. Pumps should be set to only run at the speed that water needs to flow throughout the loop. On full power, you can hear a pump but it's by no means anywhere near as loud as a fan running at full power.

Passive cooling is silent but really wouldn't be properly feasible for anything other than an office computer. Throttling is bound to happen if doing anything moderately intensive.

- - -

And speaking of size; I would argue the best thing about Water Cooling is how little space it takes up. Say you're making an HTPC and you want a Form Factor similar to a VCR player to fit in your TV cabinet. A big Twin-Tower Air Cooler won't fit, but a 360mm Water Cooler will. And will probably give you about the same cooling performance.

Water cooling can actually take up more space than air cooling. You have radiators, fans, a reservoir, a pump and tubing. It can be spread out a bit and you can affix components where possible, sure - but by no means would I say it takes up less space.

The only real offset is CPU cooler mounting height. A CPU water block naturally sits much lower than a towering air cooler.

- - -

Taking a step back; CPU Cooler performance, like RAM Capacity, makes little actual performance difference once you have enough. If the PC doesn't overheat under any circumstance, that's good enough. And any extra cooling is just more noise, bulk and expense.

This is true to an extent. But CPU cooler performance is rather critical in any system. Air nor water will ever cool below ambient temperature but the noise difference is an important aspect to a great number of users.

- - -

The one place where Water Cooling *can* make a difference is your Graphics Card. An aftermarket Water Cooling system can allow for more aggressive GPU overclocks, and that DOES push your framerate up. But that's a very expensive upgrade path, and you're better off just buying a more powerful GPU in the first place. We're talking about such an expensive upgrade that you could almost buy a second GPU for the price.

Water cooling makes a difference to both CPU and GPU temps in real-world scenarios. Using the same logic, you can overclock your CPU more aggressively as well as your GPU. Many people will water cool only their CPU for these benefits.

I've also never personally understood the "buy more powerful GPU instead of watercooling". In some circumstances, yes - it is a better upgrade. In other circumstances - it is not. My GPU water block was $80. I did not need a better card and anything more powerful would have been bottlenecked by my CPU anyway. Perhaps that's just my take on it, but I see this argument a lot and whilst there is some sense in it, it isn't applicable to all situations.

- - -

As for my 2 cents: Custom loop water cooling is good for temperatures, noise levels, and aesthetics. Is it needed for most users? Absolutely not.

Air cooling is a fine way to cool hardware, albeit often noisier.

AIO Water cooling is a bit gimmicky. They're good for a few years before they need replacing and their performance is relatively on-par with air cooling. They can be good for some cases with CPU air cooler height restrictions or RAM slot spacing, and they do look 'neater' in general.

[Monk]

I think you are being a bit dishonest with watercooling a gpu for only 80 bucks, that only works if you already have atleast enough excess radiator space.

so, let's another 80 bucks for a 360 rad, then a pump / res combo, so, 100-200 for anything decent (D5 alone is near 80), atleast 6 extra fittings at a minimum a fiver a piece, so an extra 30 add in a tenner for tubing and your $80 water cooling becomes closer to $300.

that money is far better spent going up a gpu tier as watercooling won't grant that much extra performance these days even if you power mod, in which case you'll be pumping lots more heat into your system.

I think half the problem around this subject is people using watercooling to describe an aio or a full custom loop, 90% of people seem to mean aio when they talk about water cooling.

[CravenCoyote]

Nguyên văn bởi Monk:

I think you are being a bit dishonest with watercooling a gpu for only 80 bucks, that only works if you already have atleast enough excess radiator space.

so, let's another 80 bucks for a 360 rad, then a pump / res combo, so, 100-200 for anything decent (D5 alone is near 80), atleast 6 extra fittings at a minimum a fiver a piece, so an extra 30 add in a tenner for tubing and your $80 water cooling becomes closer to $300.

that money is far better spent going up a gpu tier as watercooling won't grant that much extra performance these days even if you power mod, in which case you'll be pumping lots more heat into your system.

I think half the problem around this subject is people using watercooling to describe an aio or a full custom loop, 90% of people seem to mean aio when they talk about water cooling.

My GPU water block was indeed $80. No dishonesty there, my friend.

You seem to be under the impression you need a separate loop for a GPU. You don't, it's added to the loop already cooling the CPU. I mean, you COULD cool the GPU on a separate loop but there's really little reason to.

So yes, if you need your water blocks, pump, reservoir, radiators, fans, tubing and fittings then it'll cost a lot in the first instance. But if you already have a loop (as I would imagine most people do if looking to water cool their GPU), adding a water block for the GPU isn't exactly going to break the bank.

This is why it's a strange argument to me - yes, of course you could spend more money on a more powerful gpu if you will benefit from it and not be bottlenecked. But people water cool their graphics cards because they don't want/need a more powerful card, or don't want to listen to fans spinning.

"Want to water cool that more powerful GPU? Why water cool that more powerful GPU when you could get an even MORE powerful GPU?" It's an endless cycle. If you have a GPU you're happy with and you want to water cool it, then do it. If you want to forgo water cooling then upgrade the card if desired instead.

[Monk]

At the same time if your only cooling a cpu, chances are you didnt get enough radiators to also cool the the gpu properly as well, which is why I pointed out the flaw, also, the cheaper blocks won't usually be full cover which will limit potential a bit.

My point is, if starting from scratch, it's alot more than 80 bucks and starting with a gpu can make alot more sense than a cpu these days, so I feel mentioning it was valid.

[CravenCoyote]

I mean, I never said you could water cool a system for $80, I said my water block was $80 so that point is kind of moot. Of course starting from scratch you need the full kit. Regardless of whether you decide to water cool your GPU or CPU first, you're still looking at similar prices for quality blocks.

A 420mm rad (or even 360mm) would be enough to cool a CPU and GPU. The 'cheaper' blocks you mention are not card specific, they are for the die only and sold as universal blocks and can be had far cheaper than $80 but still need additional cooling for vram etc.